Ed Snyder began this blog in order to share his decade-long experience with all things cemeterial. As a photographer specializing in images of cemetery statuary, I've run into some interesting people, had some unexplainable experiences, and had a lot of fun.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Vicarious Cemetery Travel

Bianca, by Mike Spak

At the beginning of June, 2015, I took a trip to Denver, Colorado,
with my family. I had to teach all weekend at a medical conference, and had no
opportunity to do any cemetery travel. One evening we had dinner with my friend
Mike Spak, who lives in Boulder, Colorado. During dinner, he began showing me the
photos on his smart phone. Oddly, several were cemetery photos that he had
taken in various places.

I had forgotten that he did this sort of thing. So during
dinner, I enjoyed some cemetery travel vicariously through him! The photos you
see here are all Mike's.

The angel with the guitar belongs to Bianca Halstead (1965 – 2001), a.k.a Bianca Butthole. She was
the bassist and lead singer of the Hollywood-based hard rock band Betty
Blowtorch. Bianca was killed in an auto accident in New Orleans. She is buried in
the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, CA. Hollywood Forever is a “must see” for any Cemetery Traveler. I’ve
been there twice. (Read more about Bianca here http://foodchainrecords.com/bianca/)

William S. Burroughs (1914 – 1997), is the American beat writer
famous for his 1959 counterculture novel Naked Lunch. He is interred in
the Burroughs family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri. I
have always felt guilty for not reading Burroughs, though I am a big fan of
Jack Kerouac, another beat writer. Quite a bit of Kerouac’s novel On the Road is based in Denver,
and I did feel a bit of that vibe walking down Larimer Street, which is where
Kerouac hit town in 1947 when this area was the town’s skid row.

Now for the “Black Angel” of Council Bluffs. Okay, so I
thought I knew my cemetery lore. I also thought Mike made up this moniker
because this Victorian-era bronze patina angel had taken on a dark hue. Turns
out it is locally known as the “Black Angel of Council Bluffs,” Council Bluffs
being a town in Iowa across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska.

The angel resides in Fairview Cemetery, marking the grave of
Ruth Ann Dodge. The bronze sculpture holds a bronze basin of running water and appears to be standing in a granite
boat. After Dodge died in 1916, her two daughters commissioned the memorial
to be made by Daniel Chester French, who is best known for creating
the white marble statue of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C. According to the website, www.prairieghosts.com, the young
women “had strict criteria for French as to how the angel was supposed to look.
They wanted it to be a likeness of an angel that had appeared to their mother
during a series of visions that she had before her death.”

Interesting. Many such sculptures are created either from a
mold or from a live model. This one appeared to be created in the likeness of
an actual angel. According to www.prairieghosts.com,
Dodge’s dreams were realistic and overwhelming visions about which her daughter
Anne stated: “We realized this was no dream, no ordinary occurrence, but an
apparition such as appeared to those saints of olden times, who were spiritual
seers, holy enough to penetrate the fleshly veil and view spiritual things
hidden from the worldly minded.”

In these visions, Ruth Dodge described to her daughters that
she was on the rocks of a seashore. Out of the mist, “she saw an ancient boat
appear that was covered with roses and rare and fragrant flowers. As it
approached, she saw that a beautiful young woman was standing in the bow of the
ship. As soon as Ruth saw her, she knew that she was a spiritual being and “not
of this earth.” (ref.)

“The young woman was clad in a glistening white garment that
fell in long folds from her shoulders to her feet. Her hair, which reached to
her shoulders, looked like spun gold, forming a halo around her head. Her eyes
were bright and seemed to look at Ruth, and yet through her, and were filled
with an expression that was beyond description.”

The being came toward Ruth carrying a vessel under her arm. The
vessel was filled with water that Ruth said “glistened, glittered and sparkled
like millions of diamonds.” The woman offered it to her and urged her to drink from it,
telling her that it contained a blessing. But as much as Ruth craved the water,
she told her daughters, she was not ready to drink it just yet. A few moments
later, she “awoke” and the vision was gone. (ref.)

"Ruth had the same vision three times and on the third time,
she drank from the water that the angel offered her. A few days later, she
died. On her deathbed, she told her daughters that the angel offered her the
“wonderful water of life. I drank from it and it gave me immortality.” (ref.)

To the best of their abilities, and based on Ruth’s physical
description of the supernatural being in her visions, her daughters
had the “black angel” sculpted and placed over their mother’s grave. They must have assumed it was an angel, since their mother never mentioned wings. The angel
is standing in a granite boat and is carrying a vessel with water that
continually runs. I never really thought about fountains in cemeteries. The angel may symbolize immortality, but then so might running water. The water of life ....

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